Over the past two decades, residential bathrooms have become increasingly more elaborate, lavish, and luxurious. In most high-end bathrooms, custom fixtures, custom made sinks, custom showers, custom baths, and custom wall and shower tile have become commonplace in residential homes and luxury hotels. For example, in most of these high-end custom bathrooms, showers utilize custom tile, including but not limited to, marble, granite, ceramic, and travertine. In these custom showers, corner shelves have also become increasingly popular to place shampoos, soap, and other toiletries inside the shower in lieu of alternative options such as shower caddies. These corner shelves advantageously provide the functional utility of storing items within the shower while concurrently being aesthetically pleasing.
Conventionally, these corner shelves have at least two different modes of installation. A first mode of installation includes framing a corner shelf area using lumber, which is subsequently covered with sheet rock. After hanging sheet rock within the shower area, and over the corner shelf area, decorative tile or stone is subsequently placed within the shower and forms both the shower area and the corner shelf. However, this method of forming a corner shelf within a shower is complex and time consuming. Also, these types of shower corner shelves are often susceptible to water damage and deterioration because water often penetrates through holes in the grout if the grouting is not constantly maintained. A second mode of installation includes, as illustrated for example in FIG. 1(a)-1(c), installing a pre-formed corner shelf 20 within an existing shower corner. As shown in FIG. 1(a), in order to install pre-formed shower corner shelf 20 within a pre-existing shower corner, a tile saw must first be used to cut and remove a portion of the tile that forms a groove/channel 10 capable of receiving complimentary protruding features 21, 22 from the pre-formed corner shelf 20. For example, when installing shelf 20, an adhesive is applied to protruding features 21, 22 and then protruding features 21, 22 are pressed into groove/channel 10 with sufficient pressure for a sufficient time period of time such that shelf 20 is fixed to the shower corner. After installation of the shelf 20, grout may be applied around lip 24 to prevent water from leaking into the wall immediately behind shelf 23 and the shower tile. After installing shelf 20, shelf ledge 23 can be used for toiletry storage. Similar to the first corner shelf installation mentioned above, the shower corner shelf installation depicted in FIGS. 1(a)-1(c) is also very time consuming and very complex. In addition, conventional shower corner shelves 20 are typically very heavy, which over time leads to structural fatigue resulting in cracks and/or gaps forming between lip 24 and the shower wall. Once cracks or gaps form, water leaks into groove/channel 10 and may lead to water damage to portions of the bathroom immediately behind shelf 20 and the shower tile.